As you might deduce from my earlier post about my relationship
with books, I read a lot. Because I love learning and I love doing it
through books. But there’s another aspect to being a bibliobroad for which I’m
extremely grateful—and that’s being given books and recommendations for books
from friends. And I have a lot of those.
In fact, in the past week I’ve gone through three such,
and am currently working on a fourth. The ones I finished are god is not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything, by Christopher Hitchens; The
Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued his
Empire, by Jack Weatherford; and All
Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945, by Max Hastings.
I’m still chowing down, so to speak, on The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving
Relationship with Food, by John S. Allen.
Now, see—I probably would have got round to Hastings’s
narrative history of World War II on my own, because of me being a military
historian; and he’s written compellingly on a number of conflicts. (I
particularly recommend his Warriors:
Portraits from the Battle Field, which is a series of concise biographies
of men and women who were at their finest when they were literally under the
gun.) But I hadn’t, and I can’t tell you how much delight I took in unwrapping
the Christmas paper a couple of years ago and finding it. My completely non-military
friend Marcia just got it perfectly right.
In fairness, it’s taken me several months to get through
it; I could only do about 20-30 pages per day, and it’s more than 700 pages
long if you read the citations, which I do. But Hastings filters that war
through quotes from a variety of sources, the bulk of them ordinary
people—housewives, students, factory workers, soldiers. You can find the usual
self-serving crap from the politicians, generals and tycoons elsewhere; this
one has the view from the ground in so many ways.
I got the pointer to Hitchens from a Facebook friend—in
the past month I also read his memoir, Hitch-22,
and the book he wrote while dying of esophageal cancer, Mortality. I would never have been driven to him without the push,
because I’d read him occasionally in Vanity
Fair, and—like all VF contributors—he had an attitude out to here, which could be summed up in one
sentence: “I am published in Vanity Fair.
Look on my works, ye puny, and despair.” There’s no piece in that publication
in which the writer does not form a major focus of the story. (Dominick Dunne
was another example.) I find this irritating after about the third instance,
and as far as Hitchens went, most of his stuff struck me as more political
manifesto than anything you could call actual reporting.
The three Hitchens books exhibited this in the extreme.
Well, okay—one was a memoir, so that should get a pass. (Although I found it
very interesting that, while he goes into great detail about his political
beliefs and friendships with various men—and atheism, of course—there is no
mention of his first wife, only passing reference to his second, and you
wouldn’t know he had three children if you didn’t look him up in external
sources.)
Hitchens is a very stylish writer, no doubt about it; no
one knows that better than he himself. I’d have liked to see some examples of
that put to use in just reporting something—in fact, he had quite an extensive
career as a journalist, and I wonder how good his reporting was, because
everything I’ve read is pretty much diatribe in one form or another. (I’m not
saying he was not a brave man; he put himself in harm’s way many times to cover
stories in unpleasant places. He even went through a “controlled” form of
waterboarding so he could write about the experience for VF. It was one of his more measured pieces.) He strikes me as
showing a schoolboyish relish in taking cheap shots and name-calling; if you
express views different from his, you’re a gargoyle, or a boobie. Sometimes
you’re a short gargoyle.
I also found some of his historical facts, ah, inaccurate (in two
of his books); and when I come across bad facts that I easily recognize I
always wonder what else is wrong that I don’t know about. Plus, if you’re going
to engage in acts of political snark using historical events in support, it
would be more impressive if you got your facts right. Certainly there should
have been an editor to point this stuff out, but perhaps if you’re a regular
contributor to Vanity Fair, you don’t
need no stinkin’ fact checkers?
Well, I suppose much can be forgiven because he really
knows how to turn a phrase. Going from Hitch to Weatherford was like eating a
plateful of brown rice and steamed vegetables the day after having your entire
dinner comprising nothing-but-nachos accompanied by a grande bowl of guacamole washed down by several birdbath-sized margaritas
on the rocks made with Reposado and a
couple of shots of Grand Marnier floating on top. With that crust of salt
around the rim, too, because with Hitchens there are no half measures.
The
Secret History of the Mongol Queens was a gift from another
friend—and another bibliobroad. Over the years I’ve got the most interesting books
from her, including a study of redheads, history of the Little Black Dress, and
the one I’m currently working on, about humans’ biological and cultural approaches
to food. Carol Ann doesn’t need an occasion to send a book—sometimes I just am
surprised when something appears in the mail, because she came across something
she thought I’d find interesting. Mongol Queens just appeared beside my door mid-way through last month. Yay!
I’d actually read Weatherford’s earlier work, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern
World. It was quite interesting, although I’m generally not a fan of the
notion that “Nation/Ethnic group X saved/made civilization” all on its own.
Nonetheless, I’d really enjoyed it. I thought this one was interesting, too—evidently
Genghis Khan’s gifts for ruling and bringing people together was passed on to
his female offspring, not his male progeny. I thought he could have made his
point with somewhat less verbiage, but I’m always open to new explorations and
interpretations of the past. And I don’t know a whole lot about Asian history.
And now I’m finding out a whole lot more about the
biology of eating. It’s another book that I probably wouldn’t have sought out
for myself (although if I’d come across it in a library display, I probably
would have checked it out), so another change in direction courtesy of a friend.
A lot of tasting takes place in the brain, it seems. Like so many other things.
I’ve just got to the chapter on memories of food and eating. Yum.
Well, I could go on, but you take my point. Today I’m
grateful for friends who feed my learning habit with books—on all kinds of
subjects.
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